I'm not cutting it. Read it.
Religion doesn't belong in public schools and teaching intelligent design as if it's a valid alternative to evolution is teaching religion.
Nobody's claiming that an amoeba turned into a monkey. Here's how evolution works: genetic variation exists in a population. Some of the variants are better suited to survive and reproduce in their local, immediate environment than others. These individuals do survive and reproduce more and therefore the genes that gave them the advantageous traits exist at a higher frequency in the next generation.
That's it. The trick is that it keeps happening every generation for billions of years and the environment things are adapting to keeps changing both because of geological events and because all the other living things around them are also evolving.
Intelligent design fails by oversimplifying. The proponents of intelligent design want us to picture evolution as single species evolving in a vacuum (or a static environment) over a short period of time and that's not how it works. They resort to setting up a straw man because there is no problem with the theory of evolution by natural selection. The claim that life on Earth is "too complicated" to have arisen solely from natural processes may be appealing but it would be irresponsible to present it as legitimate science.
If secondary school science education weren't so under-funded and so besieged by people who want to hijack it for their own political ends, nobody would be fooled into thinking intelligent design is anything other that creationism in a new package.
Now, if they were talking about teaching intelligent design from an honest, scientific perspective - that is, explaining why it has nothing to do with science - then that would be great. It would be great if students could be exposed to new ideas - in my high school English classes, we studied the Bible and the Koran and in history classes we learned about all the major world religions. Learning why some people don't like the idea of natural evolution would undeniably be valuable. But that's not what Bush & co want. They want to convert people to Christianity, in public schools, using public funds.
We scientists aren't against religion. We don't go around trying to prove that God doesn't exist. We acknowledge that there's no way to prove it empirically one way or the other so we stay out of it. Of course we have our own personal beliefs but unlike the people who want religion taught in public schools, we understand that belief is private and personal and that we have no right to force those beliefs on other people. Science has nothing to do with belief. Science is about continuously testing theories. It's rare for a theory to survive this rigorous testing for as long as the theory of evolution has. That's a testament to how good it is at explaining what it sets out to explain. That doesn't mean it'll never change. There have been modifications, such as punctuated equilibrium. That's how science works. We keep working on a theory, testing and refining it. Even as better tools have come along that didn't exist in Darwin's time, like radioactive dating, the basic principle of natural selection has still been the best explanation taking into account the new evidence. Intelligent design is unscientific fundamentally because it is untestable. It proposes that the process responsible for creating the evidence we observe is beyond rational human comprehension. Arguments like that have no place in science because there's no way to apply the scientific method to them. Therefore they do not belong in the science classroom.
We object to creationism because creationists are trying to take over science. To force a science teacher to teach creationism/intelligent design alongside natural evolution is like forcing a math teacher to say "but the product of two negative integers might not be a positive integer. It's just a theory." That's how rock-solid the theory of evolution is. Denying evolution by natural selection is like denying the existence of atoms or gravity. Do people have the right to deny those things? Sure they do but keep them away from our science curriculum.
I wonder if anyone feels attacked by my statements. As a scientist, I feel attacked whenever someone says "evolution is just a theory," not because I believe in science in the unquestioning way someone believes in a religion, because I don't - if I did, I would hardly qualify as a scientist - but because it indicates to me how hostile our culture has become towards scientific inquiry and intellectual pursuits in general. This hostility has paved the way for the Bush administration to continue to claim that global warming isn't happening and that mass extinction resulting from human activity isn't a problem. Public education - or lack of it - in the natural sciences has a huge impact on public opinion about environmental policy.
And it scares me in a more general way that we're taking steps towards a theocracy. Religion and government should have nothing to do with each other, apart from the government guaranteeing religious freedom. It's ironic that the Bush administration goes on about liberating the people living under repressive, religion-based regimes in other countries while insidiously trying to shoehorn religion into our own government.
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